Facing myself

Man, I'm just a bit too spacey lately to make the promised "this is who I'm reading" posts (I'm gonna have to grab myself a blogroll account and get to linking!). The cognitive effects of bipolar disorder are not always bad, but I've begun to realize that there *are* effects (not positive, unfortunately).

Starting up with school again has made these cognitive effects painfully obvious. Long story short, my algebra class is out and an Anthro class (yes, with my favourite professor) is in. Sitting in class with him on Thursday I realized that although many of his introductory comments were familiar, I'd forgotten who was who - and that my habit of copious note taking was going to have to be put into action from day one. It's definitely a help to read those full paragraph notes when I'm writing up an essay!

Right now it seems my struggle is to accept the facts. Not accept that I'll be like this FOREVER, but that my brain isn't working the same way it used to. Accept that I get stressed out faster than the average person, accept that I have a choice about what I do, even if making that choice makes me 'different'.

Came to the realization this week that it might come down to 4 years of part time school to finish up my B.A. - because I don't want to quit school but I also am unsure that a full time schedule will work for me. My dreams of being done with school by my 40th birthday may not come to pass.

But maybe I should look at it this way: I'm fighting back from a 20 year plus history with this mood disorder. I'm making up for lost time, and for that, I can take time.

An announcement

I have a cold.
What I thought was worsening of allergies has settled down in my throat (my poor, sore throat), and I am feeling quite punk.

On the up side, it's a mild cold.
On the downside, it's the first week of school and all I wanna do is sleep.

My question is, are chocolate chip cookies good for a cold?

I write, therefore I am/Revisiting

Whenever I get discouraged by blogging, I find something which gives me hope or proof that my writing is doing work. Usually it's just doing work for me, but it's work all the same. Sometimes when I feel particularly adrift, I connect back up with something essential by reading my own writing.

Tonight I had cause to visit the archives of this very blog and I found an entry from October 2006 which really touched me. It's a review of sorts, of a documentary by British Actor/Writer Stephen Fry called "The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive".

All day I've caught snippets on the web about Owen Wilson and his alleged suicide attempt. Perhaps that puts me in the mood to revisit the subject of mood disorders. Perhaps it's because I'm thinking of doing some outreach at school around the subject. Who knows.

In any case, I urge you to click through to that entry for some fair writing of mine and a review of a documentary you should watch if you can get hold of it.

I'm stuffed

Really, stuffed. So, as much as I'm into this Fat/Body Acceptance thing, there are some times when I really don't like the weight I've gained. So there's that.

What's weird is that I'm kicking the vegetarian styles for nearly every meal lately. But I don't know why I say "it's weird" as if being vegetarian and being thin were equal to one another.

Tonight I ended up making two dinners which were nearly identical. The boys and I had gone to the Co-op for food on Friday and picked up a variety of veg we needed to cook: a zephyr squash, a zucchini, some carrots, sweet onion. I sliced these up on the diagonal, took some seitan (wheat gluten), and the 8 yr old and I agreed on a green Thai curry. Once the sauce was made I realized it was going to be far too hot for him, so I added garlic and sugar snap peas to the veggie mix and made a stir fry for him. I put some Ginger People Ginger Lime sauce in it and it was GOOD.

We ate the curry/stirfry with white basmati rice and ate in the livingroom because we still don't have a dining room table. I found a perfect small table for us but won't have it until Thursday. By the weekend I hope to have a couch as well and then I can begin to think about entertaining.

School started today and we took the bus! Our new school district (along with our old) doesn't begin classes until the 4th, but my school started this morning. Both of my instructors were very kind about him being there today, let's hope they feel this way all week!

The bus was fun. The ride was less than 15 minutes, and I didn't have to park in the crazy lot! Okay, did I say it was 'fun'? It was the bus, but it was wonderful to have that time to chat and relax. It will be an adjustment (especially to the lack of control), and I did have a wee anxiety attack (just a racy heart OMG feeling for a few minutes), but overall and okay trip. We got a ride home from my fantastic buddy J, and she gave me her Algebra book (she took the same course over the summer). So the first day was pretty good. I've got a couple of hours of homework for which I am far too tired, so I'm either going to rest or go to bed early and work on it over coffee in the morning.

It feels good to have gotten so much done today (cleaned, recycled lots of boxes, baked cookies, did laundry, did dishes, plus all of the other stuff I wrote about), but I am ready to stop being busy and rest.

Dinner

Dinner tonight was delicious and vegetarian (Eggplant-pepita enchiladas with homemade red sauce). Still didnt have access to my sauce pans or soup pot, so the sauce was done entirely in the slow cooker and the filling was cooked in a stainless steel bowl in the oven. Let's hear it for making the best of things! The enchilada sauce turned out well, and the whole kit and caboodle was quite delicious (but not very attractive, so no pictures).

I also whipped up a bean salad, which I've been wanting to make since I "discovered" it at a local restaurant. It's a lot like a three bean (sweet and sour dressing) but it's just dry beans, no green or yellow. Served the bean salad with some slices of perfectly ripened avocado, lo que muy rica!

Vegetarian cooking has been on my mind lately because the 12 year old came home from NY as a vegetarian. I think it's funny and then feel bad for not totally respecting him. However, he doesn't cook for himself, so it's a little funny. Gives me a chance to get back in touch with my inner vegetarian.

What's funny is that he's not even having dinner with us tonight!

I'm so beat, this not-sleeping thing is really a bit of a drag.

Oh, did I mention the part where the toilet overflowed and I ended up having to mop the floor and wash all the towels and the rug that got soaked?

Since I'd planned to mop the bathroom today, it wasn't all bad. But still. Also, a great excuse to use my new dryer, which is huge and drys clothes really fast.

not-errata

1. Sometimes I *do* make the best of a bad situation: just now I noticed the sun had come out, so I sent the children out to play with a picnic lunch, a watch, and instructions to try to stay outside for 90 minutes, weather permitting. This allows me time to clean and plan the rest of the day's activities, as well as sitting down to have my own lunch.
2. The weather seems to have turned suddenly (it's been raining raining raining and the ceiling in our office was leaking yesterday, but they've hopefully sorted it out for now), so hopefully the boys won't be stuck in the rain.
3. "The Lives of Others" was really good on second viewing. It left the 2nd run theater last night and is on DVD now, so if you've missed it, go rent it.
4. I somehow managed to wedge my pots and pans into the drawer under the oven in such a way as to prevent it from opening. This is very nearly tear inducing, as I was planning on making some red sauce for enchiladas (never mind cooking the filling). For now I threw the first ingredients into the crockpot and plan to slow cook it until I can get bf to come over and help me wrest the drawer open.
5. Bipolar disorder sucks. Srsly.
   
6. Me encanta español.
7. HDTV is pretty cool, and the difference in picture quality in the analog and digital over-the-air channels can be stunning - check out the PBS series about Islam in Spain, it's gorgeous in HD.
8. My Netflix Queue isn't very...organized yet. Things are lumped together by genre and actor, as that's how I found most of it. I'm looking forward to watching Cache this evening.
9. The apartment is going to look great. Eventually.
   
10. I'm feeling incredibly anti-social and hungry for company at the same time.

(So what's a latin word for list of crap that sounds like errata? Because I realized too late that errata was a list of corrections, and this is just a list. Regesta maybe?)

Now I never have to leave the house!

I've signed up for Netflix, picked up a teevee on which to watch the DVDs, got my DSL hooked up and now I NEVER HAVE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE AGAIN.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, I will have to do stuff like walk the kid to school and attend my own classes. But when I need or want to hermit, I've got things set up (still need a couch and bookshelves but we are getting there!).

Upcoming posts...boring depression update

So I've been driving all over hill and dale finding wifi hotspots in town while waiting for my internet connection to be hooked up at my place. In the meantime I've started composing blog posts off line (gasp!), but we all know I'm an impulsive creature and this doesn't suit me as much as you'd think. I love the immediacy of writing and publishing one-two-three.

Tonight I've been working on a couple of film reviews and a longish piece on depression (particularly in black women). It's rough and not pretty and right now it's all over the place. Writing while depressed can be quite a slog. I'm pretty 'high functioning' even when at my worst - that's to say I generally shower and wear clean clothes during my down periods, but actual doing of things, up to and including thinking clearly - that's a struggle.

Being bipolar means that antidepressants are generally contraindicated (at least by themselves) in part because they can precipitate euphoric/manic states (which unbeknownst [hey, that isn't really a word, is it?] to me they did for a while). I've taken two different mood stabilizers, both of which dampened down my irritability and highs but did nothing for my lows, making life pretty unattractive. Right now I have been nearly craving prozac for the lovely near mania it produces in me after a few weeks. I'm so sick of being low, I cannot begin to tell you.

I hate talking about it knowing that it turns people off, but I also hate feeling as though something which right now is a very large part of life is not on the table for discussion. It's important to acknowledge it and when its relevant, talk about it.

I can't conjugate my verbs!

Okay, I was going to title this post "autumn is coming" in Spanish, but for the life of me cannot recall how to conjugate venir properly. (El verano otoño esta viendo veniendo - is that it?)

Oh well.

The 8 year old and I are sitting at yet another local cafe (internet at home seeming like an impossible dream), outside this morning, and we are both COLD. It's a mere 63° F here, and breezy.

I'm looking for a photo that the boys and I took yesterday with Photobooth...
yes, the almost 12 year old is back in town and we've had a really wonderful time so far. Tonight we are having a 'sleep over'/movie party, I think we are going to make homemade pizza...

Okay, that picture. Oh, there were many crazy ones - here are a few gems...

"CARE turns down Federal Funds for Food Aid"

A very interesting article from the NYT about how CARE is moving away from subsidized food aid (which supports US Farm subsidies) toward other types of aid which support the growth of local economies (at least, that's my take from a cursory glance at the article).

Worth a closer look, but my time at the coffee shop is growing short, so I had to blog about it right away.

An excerpt:

MALELA, Kenya — CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from some $45 million a year in federal financing, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

Walter Otieno, a Kenyan farmer, with his children in the small store he has been able to finance from his sunflower sales. More Photos »

CARE’s decision is focused on the practice of selling tons of often heavily subsidized American farm products in African countries that in some cases, it says, compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

The charity says it will phase out its use of the practice by 2009. But it has already deeply divided the world of food aid and has spurred growing criticism of the practice as Congress considers a new farm bill.

“If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote,” said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital.

Under the system, the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

"grace"

(click the pic for the punchline)

I love Cat and Girl!

Vanity, fair or foul

Okay, so I've been taking pictures of myself again - I used to, A LOT, along with pictures of other stuff. Bf would always make fun of me (which wasn't very nice, btw) for taking self portraits, and eventually I got depressed enough that I didn't want to take pictures of anything. So... I see my return to self-portraiture, as it is, as a positive development.

And my hair looked SUPER CUTE yesterday. I have yet to try the Mixed Chicks products, or Miss Jessies Curly Pudding, or the recommended products from Naturally Curly.com, but I've taken to not using shampoo each time I wash my hair (the "no poo" approach to naturally curly hair care), and it's helped!

The picture above isn't great, but it kind of shows how cute my hair was. A little.

Right now I'm happy to feel even the vaguest urge to be vain, because it means I care about something. And that is good enough for me, venial sin or no.

Togetherness

Just a short note to say: if the 8 year old and I spend much more time together with his BAD ASS ATTITUDE, it's gonna get nasty.

I really really should have put him in summer camp this week.

No internet and no phone make lava lady something something.